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The Daily Reckoning is a financial news site I only discovered recently. I came across it when I was looking for a site where I could track the price of iron ore. But it also has all kinds of financial news like the Australian Financial Review (AFR) site has. The trouble with the AFR site is that they now have paywalls going up on more and more of their content. This means that you get to see the headline, and maybe the first paragraph, but if you want to read the article you have to buy a subscription and the subscriptions are not 'cheap'.

There is one little issue with The Daily Reckoning; they have pop-ups suggesting you buy various reports that tend to pop up right when you are into about the third paragraph of an article. Highly annoying. But you can just close them and carry on reading.

As everything on the Web gradually moves towards making you pay for it The Daily Reckoning will probably stop being free, but for now it is a good alternative to the AFR.

So what's in The Daily Reckoning? Following are few example from 'the reckoning' for today.

The iron ore price

This is the main reason I searched for a site like this. So I could track the iron ore price. The experts are predicting that iron ore will go down to $70 a tonne by January next year (2015) and I like watching how well the experts do.

As you can see the price today is under $77 per tonne.

Australian Housing

With the current general nervousness around Australian housing and real estate I like to keep my finger on this pulse as well. I don't have any real estate investments other than my home but any kind of disaster in the real estate market will negatively affect all of us.

The article at the bottom of the clip above is worth a quick scan if you have the time (here).

Australian Economy

I have posted about this before—for whatever reason Australia's stock market is close to the worst performing since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) back in 2007/2008. I have tried a number of times to work out why this is so.

Did you know that Australia's overseas borrowings are $865 billion and that the annual interest payable on that debt is $40 billion at the current once-in-a-lifetime low interest rates. That's about $770 million per week in interest. And when interest rates begin to normalise (i.e., go back up to where they should be in a normally functioning economy) this interest rate bill is likely to double very quickly. You can sort of see now why the government is desperate to get the borrowings down.

Each of the images above links to the related sections in The Daily Reckoning and I have added a link to the front page of the site in my sidebar.